A Narrative of the 21st Century

In all seriousness, after reading Paul Krugman's column in the Times this morning I began to see the historical narrative unraveling before me, and arrived at an incredibly horrific conclusion: that the cosmopolitan movement, and the era of relative peace and American influence, were dead, silenced by the cumbersome roll of Russian steel.

Not that the Russian-Georgian entanglement represents any substantial or imminent threat, but rather that, for all its irrelevance, it marks a watershed moment in history.

For the first many years of my life, global relations were staid, the international economy boomed in the absence of any opposition to the American monolith, and democracy and free-trade agreements flourished. There might have been small skirmishes over borders, and indeed some petty wars in undeveloped areas still seeking stasis following the breakup of the USSR, but the United States retained the political capital, "moral" high-ground (whatever that means), and economic bargaining chips to broker peace deals, as well as the world's greatest last standing military to enforce them.

These are the characteristics of what Mr. Krugman calls the Pax Americana, a historic period of peace and the potential for seemingly unlimited possiblity that is now, perhaps irrevocably, slipping away.

How could we let this happen?

There was another part to the historical narrative of the 1990s that went largely unnoticed until 2001. As trader countries began to develop in Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa and South and Central America as a result of manufacturing, regional and international energy brokers, who may not have much benefited from international trade nor experienced much development, began to fatten up on the growth of nations.

We all now know what came from this combination of resentment, bitterness, and excessive oil money in the hands of the few. "Islamo-facisim" became a well-known term, and terrorists became the hired guns for global political movements.

Because the attack on our borders came from a group of Muslim extremists, not Russians or Venezuelans, combating Islamo-terrorism became the focal point, very suddenly, of twenty-first century foreign policy, and at the fore of our historical narrative.

Perhaps it was our particular addiction to Middle Eastern oil and the frightening mystique of the Islamic world that impelled our actions in Iraq. What I mean by the latter is that, in the West, countries are expected to act in rational ways. Our entire paradigm for understanding international behavior relies on terms like "interests" and concepts like the preservation of life.

Even during the Cold War, policies like escalating nuclear armament were presupposed on the platform of “mutually assured destruction,” a position premised upon the mutually assured rationality of both parties.

The Russians may have been rash and proud to proclaim their disconnect from Europe and the West, but their ties to Western logos were sufficient enough to subdue the distinctly Russian pathos which might have otherwise annihilated all the world.

Suicide bombers targeting civilians is difficult, and perhaps improper, to attempt to understand in those rational terms. Likewise, it seems that we acted in the Middle East out of fear. Fear that we, the grandest unopposed force on Earth since Marcus Aurelius, could not, with all our gold, guns and civil guarantees, assuage these people. A fear that needed to be eradicated just as quickly as it was realized, a brash attitude that led to the unilateral invasion of Iraq, degradation of international law at Guantanamo and Abu-Ghraib, and began the slow erosion of the American monolith.

Perhaps out of foolish optimism, the Western world had seemingly decided that the "Middle East problem" was the last frontier of liberalism, and the sole distraction of an otherwise increasingly globalized and cooperative world.

Students like myself saw these developments in the Middle East for what they were and championed the progress in the European Union as a model for cosmopolitanism, looking forward to the day, and perhaps the personal opportunity, to lay the capstone to the enlightenment project.

We condemned the first four years of Bush’s presidency as having damaged the United States’ reputation, but we were steadfast in our belief that a change in Washington could restore the American legacy and, with cooperation with the EU, lead the movement for internationalism and cosmopolitanism in the new century.

But in this thinking we once again ignored perhaps the most resentful and consistently excluded and ignored country of all time.

And so the narrative goes that the brooding Bear would wake from its slumber, invigorated by the influx of capital from natural gas and almost twenty years of humiliation and hardship. For all their abrasiveness and seemingly unrefined sense of world history, the Russians have proven themselves adept at recognizing their own particular sense of Russian “moments.”

With the US having overextended its military and plumb dry of world-political capital before the November elections can oust the Bush administration, and with the EU still too incomplete to present a legitimate military opposition, the Russians made their move in the Caucasus.

History may very well remember the moment as the end of the Pax Americana and the first real cosmopolitan movement. Having recessed into a nationalism-infused twentieth century virtual free-for-all restrained only by international economic interests, it may be a long time before states and peoples begin to see themselves as global citizens once again.

Regardless of the result of the US elections and the process of the EU Treaty of Lisbon, there will be repercussions from Russia’s unchecked aggression that will permutate through the next generation.

Looking back, the world in November of 2000 was a world on the verge of the greatest socio-political revolution in human history. It was a world with the necessary components of stability, interconnectivity and growth to, at long last, institute a perpetual peace with that potential for unlimited possibility.

In 1789, George Washington refused a crown and demanded that he be referred to as “Mr. President,” and not, as John Adams had proposed, “his highness,” saving a nation before he even took office.

On January 20, 2001, George W. Bush had the opportunity to do something similar.

It was the peak of American dominance in the world, the height of the Pax Americana. Granted that world affairs were not perfect (nationalism in Eastern Europe, oppressive regimes in South and Central America, tensions in the Korean peninsula, starvation, disease, genocide, and civil war across Africa), it was the closest they had come to perfection in the common era.

The younger Bush could have accepted his presidency and his role as the most powerful individual in the world, and he could have dedicated it all to preserving the freedom and dignity of every human being henceforth by slowly indicating a compassionate devolution of that power, a process both his father and his predecessor had already begun in their foreign policies.

Throughout the past two millenia, Britain, France, Spain, Rome, and Athens had failed this test, but they had also lacked the requisite technologies and circumstances to have even had the opportunity to have succeeded. So whither America?

Indeed, we now know the answer.

Perhaps it was beyond his control, and perhaps such a response in the months and years after January 2001 was inevitable in any President.

But what if America had dedicated itself to renewable energy, global citizenship, human rights, the environment, international cooperation, and paying attention to August White House briefings about potential terrorist attacks via hijacked planes in New York in 2001, and not 2005 (as the Bush administration did mercifully, and ought to be commended for, upon realizing the catastrophic failings of their first four years)?

Maybe we couldn’t have prevented 9/11, the oil crisis, the Iraq War, Russian belligerence, and the failure of the international system and the cosmopolitan project.

But maybe we could have.